Huyshe Yeatman Biggs

Huyshe Wolcott Yeatman-Biggs (2 February 1845 – 14 April 1922), until 1898 known as Huyshe Wolcott Yeatman, was an influential Church of England clergyman who served as the only Bishop of Southwark to be a suffragan bishop (in the Diocese of Rochester), the 105th Bishop of Worcester and, latterly, as the inaugural bishop of the restored see of Coventry in the modern era.

Yeatman was born at Manston House, Dorset, the younger son of Harry Farr Yeatman JP by his marriage to Emma, daughter and heiress of Harry Biggs, of Stockton House, Wiltshire. He was educated at Winchester College and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he was a Dixie Scholar, and eventually (1905) an Honorary Fellow. He was ordained in 1869 and after a curacy in Salisbury became chaplain to the bishop in 1875. That same year he married firstly Lady Barbara Legge, daughter of the 4th Earl of Dartmouth.

He was successively vicar of Netherbury and Sydenham before becoming Bishop of Southwark (a suffragan bishop in the Diocese of Rochester) in 1891, a post he was to hold for fourteen years before appointment as Bishop of Worcester in 1905. During his years there Yeatman-Biggs forged very close links with the Episcopal church in the United States. In 1898, he inherited the estate of his brother, General Yeatman-Biggs CB, and assumed the additional name of Biggs by Royal licence.

In 1918 he took on the task of reviving the Coventry diocese, during which time he came to national prominence when an unscrupulous adventurer accused him of influencing a vulnerable pensioner into leaving him her assets. Not only were the charges completely unfounded, the much smaller sum he had received was quite properly re-distributed to worthy Anglican causes.

After Yeatman-Biggs's death, a bronze effigy of him was commissioned by Hamo Thornycroft, and was the only artefact to survive more or less intact the bombing of Coventry Cathedral in 1940.